Accessing Public Data

Which method you choose to access public data depends on how you
want to work with the data. When accessing public data via the
Google Cloud Platform Console, you must authenticate with Google.
You can authenticate with any Google account; the account does not have to
be associated with the project that contains the public data, nor does it
need to be signed up for the Cloud Storage service.

By contrast, accessing public data with gsutil or a Cloud Storage
API link does not require authentication. These methods are suited for
general-purpose links to publicly shared data. For example,
an API link can be used in a web page, with client libraries,
or with a command-line tool such as cURL.

To access public data:

Console

Note: If only individual objects in a bucket are public, and not the entire
bucket, you should generally use the method described in the API link
tab. You can only access public objects via the GCP Console
if you have storage.objects.list permission for the bucket that contains
the objects.

Get the name of the public bucket.

Using a web browser, access the bucket with the following URI (you
will be asked to sign in if necessary):

https://console.cloud.google.com/storage/browser/[BUCKET_NAME]

For example, the Google public bucket gcp-public-data-landsat contains
the Landsat public dataset. You can access the bucket with:

API Link

Get the name of the bucket containing the public data.

Use the following URI to access an object in the bucket:

http://storage.googleapis.com/[BUCKET_NAME]/[OBJECT_NAME]

For example, the Google public bucket gcp-public-data-landsat contains
the Landsat public dataset. You can link to the publicly shared object
LC08/PRE/063/046/LC80630462016136LGN00/LC80630462016136LGN00_B11.TIF
with the link: